Thursday, November 3, 2016

Closer than you think

Nearly all Americans are likely to know a victim of gun violence
within their social networks during their lifetime, indicating that citizens
are "closer to gun violence than they perceive," according to a new
study by researchers from the Boston University Schools of Public Health and
Medicine.

EDITOR’S
NOTE: For me, the first was a female co-worker who was shot and killed by her
husband, also a co-worker. This happened in the early 1970s. There have been
others since, more than I care to think about. – W. Collette

In a study in the journal Preventive Medicine, the
research team used fatal and non-fatal gun injury data from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and estimates of the number of social
relationships a person accrues during his or her lifetime to gauge the likelihood
of Americans knowing a gun violence victim.

Overall, the likelihood within any given personal network was
99.85 percent; it was higher for blacks (99.9 percent) and Hispanics (99.5
percent) than for non-Hispanic whites (97.1 percent). The likelihood of knowing
a gun violence victim who died (rather than being injured) was 84.3 percent
overall, with blacks and non-Hispanic whites having the highest likelihood.

The researchers used well-established estimates of the size of a
person's social network, which puts the average number of relationships over a
lifetime at 291.

"We found that the probability of never knowing someone who
experiences gun violence over a lifetime is very small," the authors
wrote. "Leaving aside constitutional debates about approaches to
controlling gun violence, it might inform our national conversation to
recognize that nearly all Americans, of all racial/ethnic groups, will know a
victim of gun violence in their social network."

The study used CDC data from 2013, which saw 33,636 gun deaths
and 84,258 non-fatal gun injuries. Of the deaths, about 21,000 were suicides.

The authors allowed that the study did not take into account the
higher risk faced by people in "small identifiable social networks of
individuals engaged in criminal activity" or by those previously exposed
to violence.

Nonetheless, they said, "Using our assumptions, exposure to
gun violence is certain for some individuals. For others, the likelihood would
still be far from zero, even if the simplifying assumption of randomness is not
accurate."

The study's senior author, Sandro Galea, MD, dean of the School
of Public Health (SPH) and Robert A. Knox professor, said the findings
"suggest strongly the need for more firearm-related research," and he
urged that the issue of exposure to gun violence be further explored through
large-scale longitudinal studies. He and other public health leaders have been
pushing for the CDC to allocate funding for gun violence research.

Thought for the day

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

Individual One’s tweet at 4:52 AM - 17 Feb 2019 after a long, hard day of playing golf at Mar-A-Lago on Day Two of our “national emergency.”

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